The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [3]
“By and large, you’re not a thankful lot. A lot of you feel terribly cheated and that a liberal arts education is a pile of shit. You feel you’ve been conned into wasting four years of precious time. I don’t find your bitterness entirely misplaced. After all, here you are at the ridiculous age of twenty-one, with virtually no real skills except as conversationalists. Let me remark, in passing, what fantastic conversationalists you are. Most of you have mastered enough superficial information and tricks of the trade to be able to hold conversations with virtually anyone about anything. This is one of the reasons you’re such big hits at your parents’ parties. Being a good conversationalist is really what a liberal arts education is all about.
“Well, as I was saying, your bitterness is not entirely out of line. For one thing, no one has the faintest idea about what you should do next. But lest you be too bitter, let me point out that knowing a college education is a pile of shit is no small lesson. There are many people who don’t know it. In fact, probably most people don’t know it. There is surely no better place to learn this lesson than at college. In any event, you can console yourselves by knowing that you won’t waste time and make fools of yourselves later in life thinking how different it all would have been if only you had gone to college. Now that you have your degree, you can say what a pile of shit college is and no one can accuse you of sour grapes.”
My girl friend, Virginia, was in the audience with my parents, watching me and my classmates receive our precious advice and shiny new degrees.
“Well, Virge” (which is what I usually called her), “I imagine seeing a moving ceremony like that must have taken care of any silly notion you might have had about dropping out.”
She wasn’t thinking that seriously about dropping out. She had only a year to go and had seen too many friends get hung up explaining, justifying, and agonizing over whether or not to go back. Dropping out was too much work. The most efficient thing to do was get it the hell out of the way.
Our plans were vague. We had been offered a place to stay in Boston for the summer. We hoped we could find interesting jobs and I’d find some way around the draft. Virginia would go back to finish at Swarthmore and then we’d see what came up.
VIRGINIA. There was something about us that fitted together. Tumblers moved and we locked together. There were some dreadfully unhappy times, but we both needed other things more than happiness. It was those other things that we were all about.
Virginia, Virginia, Virginia, how did my life get so mixed up with yours? It was spring, my senior, your junior year. I was lonely. So were you. We started walking together and talking together, mostly me talking, babbling on like an utter fool, wishing you’d say more and trying to get up the nerve to kiss you. It wasn’t like it had been with other girls at all. For one thing, you weren’t pretty at all the way other girl friends of mine had been pretty. You were pretty but a weird pretty. Your legs were much too perfect to be quite human.
You were very different from other women I had been attracted to. Had I met you earlier I would have thought you were almost ugly, nose much too big and poorly defined, narrow, low forehead, cheek-bones high and spread, but you carried it all with such grace and dignity. Most women seemed to be either attractive or unattractive and that was that. I have never before or since met anyone who was as beautiful to me when you were beautiful or as ugly when you were ugly. Your awesome range transfixed